Tom Clancy's EndWar

Spiffy:

Iffy:

You could be drafted directly into the real armed forces due to experience gained from this game.

About a month ago, we got the kind of call from Ubisoft that we love to get: an invite to swing by and check out the latest addition to its monstrous Tom Clancy franchise, EndWar. We had already seen enough of EndWar in Germany to know that we're very much looking forward to seeing more, so it was a complete no-brainer to accept the invitation. Even though we were super-excited to see EndWar in action and to finally give the vaunted control system a whirl, we were still surprised by how far along the game seemed to be and, more importantly, how well the voice commands responded.

Call the Ball

"Actually, that's probably what we should have called it: Tom Clancy's You're Totally a Commander," joked Ubisoft Shanghai's Creative Director Michael de Plater after a particularly naive comment from the GameSpy envoy. Just because he was joking doesn't mean that he wasn't right... at least in spirit. As we've mentioned in previous coverage, the theory behind EndWar is to streamline the real-time strategy experience so that it more closely resembles the approachable Madden system, yet what Ubisoft has come up with is infinitely more compelling than any control scheme we've seen in RTSs, sports games... name your genre, EndWar has a more innovative control system.

Most of the controls for EndWar (with the exception of basic camera functions) revolve around an incredibly advanced voice command system that responds to precisely issued directives. At first the vocabulary seems a bit limited, but in a way this actually serves to increase the realism, because real-life military is concerned with establishing as narrow a vocabulary as possible to ensure that orders don't become garbled in transmission. It's elegant in its simplicity in that each of your units has a distinct numeric designation and your structures get NATO phonetic alphabet designations (like Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta) while hostile units are similarly broken down by unit numbers. Commands are restricted to only the most basic, so "attack," "reinforce," "upgrade" and "move to" make up the majority of your options.

Consequently, pretty much everything that you could want to do breaks down into a quick verbal equation: which unit you want to command + what you want it to do + who you want it done to. In practice, this typically sounds like, "Unit 2 attack Hostile 6," "Unit 5 move to Hostile 3" or "Green team upgrade Bravo: airstrike." As in the case of that last statement, things can become more complex once you begin to grasp the core mechanics, but the rewards for learning the system are great. The best part is that it's almost impossible to confuse the voice recognition system, and believe us, we tried (though unintentionally). In fact, at one point, we issued the first half of a command, were interrupted for a few seconds to answer some questions from our Ubisoft PR contact, and (a little flustered once we realized what we'd done) hastily finished the command. Our verbal foible didn't matter to EndWar, because it executed the command as though we'd spoken it all at once. Impressive!